


turn to hate

by behot



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Cal Kestis Needs a Hug, Character Study, Gen, I am taking the themes shown in JFO and I am making them SAD, Inquisitor Cal Kestis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, dealing with your problems but destructively, how the fuck does indenting and such work here i am so confused
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:54:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25216585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/behot/pseuds/behot
Summary: He wondered how he ended up like this.The fortress and Bracca were eerily the same. Scrapper or inquisitor, neither was better or worse. Why was he always tearing apart his past with his own hands?
Relationships: Cal Kestis & Trilla Suduri | Second Sister
Comments: 5
Kudos: 39





	turn to hate

**Author's Note:**

> I've been having a lot of Thoughts about inquisitor Cal so here we are

He wondered how he ended up like this.

The fortress and Bracca were eerily the same. Scrapper or inquisitor, neither was better or worse. Why was he always tearing apart his past with his own hands?

Anger wasn’t very different from the fear that kept him motivated before. Both kept him moving when it felt like nothing was left, lit a fire in his core that kept him running. Anger was a comfort, and was better than the misery that would swallow him whole if he ever stopped to breathe. So he kept his head underwater, where what he had done was muffled, as he sank lower and lower.

Hatred was easy when he hated himself. Manic energy was better than the guilt and hopelessness that promised to tear him apart if he ever stopped. So he trained and trained, until the red of his lightsaber stopped reminding him of the blood on his hands. He cut down countless droids until he was cutting down troopers. He trained until the arena walls stopped blurring with the white of another practice arena (one from a ship that used to float above Bracca), and until he could use the force without it tearing him up inside and out. It burned, but he couldn’t stop. Even if his path promised nothing but his own destruction.

The Second Sister liked to gloat about her success in bringing him in and breaking him down. When she was particularly haughty, she would brag as such to him.

“Look at what you have become, pup. Look how far you’ve fallen since I dragged you down.”

She never treated it like a good thing, her breaking him down and keeping the pieces. At least she had the decency to never act like she raised him up, instead that she dragged him down with her to drown.

A real fallen angel.

“It took so long to teach you some obedience, but here you are. You became the very thing you once swore to destroy!”

Cal sneered and reached for his lightsaber, but she was quick to grab his arm.

“Ah. Not so fast, mutt.” Her fingers clamped a bruising grip as she tightened her hold. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you if you have nowhere else to go.”

Her yellow eyes bore into his, almost begging for a confrontation. Goading him to strike at her, and lose everything. Instead, he tore his arm out of her grasp, and bowed his head.

He couldn’t see it, but he was sure she was grinning.

“Good boy. You were once so persistent. I’m glad to have beaten that out of you, too.”

Shame brushed his limbs, swirled in the air. Maybe he’d have proven her wrong, not so long ago. Maybe, in another life, he would have left her abusive hands and turned against the Empire again. 

Maybe, in another life, he never joined the Empire at all. 

But this time, all he could do was turn his heel and walk away, rage burning in his chest until he could taste smoke on his tongue. It only burned hotter as he realized that this was exactly what she wanted.

Above water was who he once was but he had nowhere to go but down. As if rocks were tied to his ankles, he was sinking deeper, deeper, deeper. It was a real paradox, unable to stop burning as he drowned under the water. 

Unlike the fallen angels, he never had a choice.

Whenever Cal looked into a mirror, it always felt like his reflection was mocking him. Like he was an impostor in his own life, acting the role he was given until he had to believe it himself. He didn’t know who he really was, but his reflection always did.

He woke up restless, plagued by dreams that weren’t quite nightmares ( _memories_ , something inside him whispered, of a city that stretched across an entire planet and soft brown robes that kept him warm), and he went to his refresher. There, he cupped his hands and drank water from the faucet until he felt a little more real, and peered at his reflection.

Yellow eyes stared back and reminded him of who he was, what he had become. They always taunted him, mocking his failures, his falling. Failing his master, failing Prauf, Cere. All he ever did was fail those he cared about the most. Failed to protect them, and failed to live up to what they fought for. 

He stared into those yellow eyes, and for a split second he remembered blue ones instead.

Anger shot through him - from the feeling of longing he felt of who he once was, from the disgust of who he had become, he couldn’t tell - and glass shattered with the force of his palm. The counter table cracked under his grip. He didn’t realize what he’d done until his blood smeared across the marble. 

_All you could ever do was destroy. How perfect you must fit in here._

The spark of anger was gone, extinguished by whatever emotion filled his lungs and tightened his throat. He couldn’t ignite his anger again when such misery put out the flames, so instead he hung his head and he cried.

Cal looked outside the viewport with little interest. In contrast to the deep blacks and dark reds that decorated the room, the explosion outside was ridiculously bright and colorful. Blinding white and yellow, with shocks of green and blue. 

Supernovae used to intrigue him as a youngling, his innocence and youth finding awe at the phenomena. Something that was destined in the force to happen, something so massive in such a large galaxy, and he was there to witness it. To see a single star collapse, and then explode outward into something much larger than it once was.

Now, however, he didn’t see much wonder. 

It was just another moment in a galaxy full of stars that would all explode eventually. Full of stars that explode every rotation. 

The door behind him slid open, but he didn’t have to turn around to see who had entered. The Second Sisters reflection was easily seen in the viewport reflection, and she took a moment to stand there before removing her helmet and moving beside him.

“Inspiring, isn’t it?” She seemed to ponder, and Cal tried not to scowl. “A star, celestial and larger than life, one that has burned bright for millennia. Long enough to see more than one empire rise and fall.”

She should watch her mouth. Such a statement could easily be taken as a sign of treason, of deflection.

“A star that probably provided life. A point of light in a sky of darkness.” Something unpleasant settled in Cal’s stomach, churning at her words. “Yet, as the force has willed it, it’s doom is inevitable. It burns only to burn itself out, and collapse when all fuel is gone.”

She grinned at his reflection, and he made a point to look away from hers and focus on the sight in front of him. He tried very hard to find interest in a certain tendril of gas, watching as it slowly changed shades of red as it dispersed into nothingness. It didn’t stop her from talking.

“And so it has one final, valiant show of life. Something that has lived a life so large, so unstable, that there’s no other way it could go out of the galaxy. And when the dust settles, new stars begin to form, and the cycle continues. Again and again.”

There’s a terrible feeling that crawls up Cal’s spine, joining the weight in his stomach. The Second Sister’s eyes fixed on the supernova with an odd amount of glee.

“But sometimes, like a phoenix, out of the ashes rises something greater. Something far more powerful. For even a star, with the pull of it’s light, cannot match the gravity of a black hole.”

Somewhere there, where the core of the star once was, light was bending and twisting. An insatiable vacuum that knew nothing but darkness; not even light could escape its pull. He could almost see it there in the colors, already sucking away at the remains.

The light will fall, as darkness demands.

“We are all luminous beings,” the Second Sister continues, turning to Cal and pressing her helmet against his chest. On autopilot, his hands come up to hold it. “And I cannot wait to see the fallout of the explosion you have created.”

Cal barely registers the sound of her footsteps, or the hiss of the door closing behind her. He looks into the empty eyes of her helmet, at his reflection in the dark, until he can’t stand the nausea bubbling up his throat. 

For a brief moment he considers throwing the helmet into the steel wall behind him. Let the satisfying feeling of everything she stood for shatter at his hands. Instead, he lets the helmet drop onto the floor, the clatter echoing with her words. 

He already knew the path that he was on. So why did her words make his hands shake, and make a panic rise that threatened to choke him? 

There’s an aftershock outside the viewport, another small burst of light adding more colors to the star’s grave. Maybe, in another lifetime, the graveyard turns into a nursery for new stars, creating light to fight the darkness. 

Maybe, in another lifetime, the star had never died at all. 

But this time, powerful and hungry, the black hole is just beginning to eat at the dust and the light, it’s gravity inevitable. And all Cal does is step over the dropped helmet and leave the lounge, not looking back. 

Sometimes he wondered if he should have tried to swim. If he even had a chance. The light gets smaller the farther he falls, darkness the only promise on the path he was dragged to. 

Did he ever have a choice?

**Author's Note:**

> Also posted on my tumblr @behot, feel free to check me out! <3


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